Throughout human history people have feared the end and have dreamt up all manner of scenarios that will bring it about. Nigel Cawthorne in Doomsday (2006) describes 50 such scenarios that fit into broad categories of war, religious apocalypse, plague, cosmic event, natural disaster, nuclear error, rogue technology, man-made disaster, climate change, extra-terrestrials, animal apocalypse, and the passage of time. These topics provide for endless speculation on the web and fruitful sources of inspiration for science fiction writers. But what do we know for a fact?

In scientific terms there are a patchwork of facts from a variety of disciplines that give us a few clues about how long we've got and what might happen but no conclusive evidence to say what will definitely happen.

For example, it is a stark and frightening fact that there are enough nuclear weapons on the planet to kill us all many times over and the number of states obtaining or trying to obtain such weapons is increasing all the time. It is surely only a matter of time before nuclear terrorism or a nuclear war occurs, the only question being how far things will escalate from there.

Another salient fact is that we know that collisions with the Earth by comets and meteorites have caused mass extinctions in the evolutionary past. This may have been the method that allowed our distant evolutionary ancestors the foothold to dominate the planet. It may also be what ultimately kills us if we don't put in place some form of defensive system to identify and neutralize the threat whilst it is still at a significant distance from the planet.

A third fact, which provides an upper time limit on the natural lifespan of the planet, is that we know that in several billion years time the fuel of our Sun will burn out leading to the destruction of the planet. Of course this will happen so far into the future that if humanity is still around it is possible that it will have invented or acquired the technology to move to other solar systems before the planet is destroyed or even to regenerate or replace The Sun.

But for many people in the world the scientific issues of doomsday are beside the point, with the issue being more a religious one. Indeed for many religious believers a doomsday scenario is one of the main pillars of their belief system. So much so that some may even consider the scientific facts wrong because those facts don't fit in with their particular religious perspective or else largely

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